


Lazarus (Alt Title: This Escalated Rather Quickly).

by stacksontrash



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 18:46:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13596117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stacksontrash/pseuds/stacksontrash
Summary: { “You make it sound like you got lost on the way to Taco Bell. Of course it matters.” He flings both hands heavenward, and catches sight of a smirk as it toys with the very corners of Theo’s lips. Liam had whispered, in the way only an excitable beta with an equally expressive alpha could, to watch out for him. To keep his cards close to his chest. To ignore the bait as it dangled right in front of his eyes. A hundred muddled ways of dressing up the fact that now he’s back, no one really knows how to handle Theo Raeken. }





	Lazarus (Alt Title: This Escalated Rather Quickly).

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written for this fandom for years. Apologies for my loose grasp upon grammar, and even looser grasp on plot. Comments and kudos are very much appreciated.

“It doesn’t matter.”

From where he’s doing a terrible job of looking casual, perched with knock knees hunched up to a hoodie which swamps his delicate frame, Stiles shoots a skeptical look at him. Engaged as they are in something of an attrition Olympics - where Theo waits with the kind of patience which seems designed to incense an itch beneath brittle, human skin, it’s little wonder that Stiles hasn’t at least attempted to chuck him out of the nearest window. Heaven knows, he’d tried it back when Derek believed that nocturnal pit stops were perfectly acceptable on a school night.  
The brunette sits cross-legged and picture fucking perfect on a speck of carpet which isn’t occupied by haphazard stacks of overdue library books, and scrunched up articles of unwashed clothing, he’s only situated in Stiles’ room because Mrs. Geyer has the same spidey senses he himself has been imbued with since birth. Just like Stiles, she’s seen past the immaculate charm of a smile which never quite makes its way to Theo’s startlingly blue eyes. 

Thoroughly sussed, and on the coat-tails of a puppy dog protest from both Liam and Scott, the responsibility of babysitting Beacon Hill’s latest Lazarus has been thrust upon him like an unwanted invitation.

“You make it sound like you got lost on the way to Taco Bell. Of course it matters.” 

He flings both hands heavenward, and catches sight of a smirk as it toys with the very corners of Theo’s lips. Liam had whispered, in the way only an excitable beta with an equally expressive alpha could, to watch out for him. To keep his cards close to his chest. To ignore the bait as it dangled right in front of his eyes. A hundred muddled ways of dressing up the fact that now he’s back, no one really knows how to handle Theo.

Heck, as distinctly perverse as it might’ve been, maybe if he’d shown an ounce of emotion then things would’ve been easier. Even as that notion swims to the forefront of Stiles’ consciousness he winces a little; fidgeting beneath that same skin (a body which hadn’t quite fit right since a while back, if he was truly honest with himself), thinking of just how affected Theo had been at the end. When they’d all been patting each other on the back. Another murderer, another liar who’d threatened the sanctity of pack. Disposed of. _Forgotten_. Life had resumed, slotted right back into its usual groove as if Theo Raeken had been an anomaly. That small loose end in a long line of trials and tribulations they’d overcome together.

Except, late at night when the clocks had stopped chiming, and his only company came in the form of impenetrable silence, punctuated by the distant hum of a world beyond Beacon, Stiles could almost see it. That vivid, unexpected, inexplicable vulnerability he’d seen in Theo’s eyes. A wild gaze filled with unadulterated horror as he was dragged down into the unseen bowels of hell. He’d been in the midst of congratulating himself for being the only one who saw right through Theo’s act from the very beginning. Yet as the weeks crept along in the wake of their latest victory, no one else seemed to be losing sleep over someone who had no right to be mourned.

Now here he is in technicolor, acting like he’d just stepped out to buy some fucking burritos. Like nothing had transpired to turn the both of their lives inside out. Like a mannequin going through those same smug beats Scott, Liam, Lydia, and the rest all expect from him. Its something Stiles would profess not to be able to fathom, but in the corners of his consciousness which he’s left to rot it might as well have been a blueprint for how he’d acted after being devoured internally and without by something beyond his control.

And in the darkest reaches, festooned with intentional cobwebs, and hidden behind doors with faulty locks, now human through and through, Stiles knew he’d liked a part of it. Having no autonomy and absolute power. The cocktail of medication keeping him afloat even after Scott got the bite didn’t allow him to get drunk on anything else. All the cruelty he’d dished out had been his drug of choice. In the end, the teen sitting cross-legged, idle fingertips picking at a tear in the knee of stolen jeans; he isn’t so different after all. Sympathising with him feels like climbing into bed with the enemy all over again. Only this time Stiles isn’t being jerked from pillar to post like some kind of morbid puppet.

No, he’s having an internal melt down over Theo _fucking_ Raeken whilst trying to resist the urge to go twenty questions on his ass. To seem as if he cares more than either of them might want to admit.

Instead he reaches over to a desk which has seen better days, and proceeds to cram the contents of a bag of stale fritos into his mouth. Regret settles leaden in his stomach, heavier than junk food has any right to be, and Theo merely looks towards the open window before rising with easy grace to pad barefoot towards the breeze which is carding at half drawn curtains.  
That’s another thing he’s noticed during his totally unintentional, definitely not slightly obsessive study of a man who belongs nowhere, and yet feels like he’s stamped his mark all over Beacon Hills in the last two years. Theo does as he’s always done, working his way back into Scott’s _soft_ , gentle heart as if he never left it. Quick with words that sound far too harsh coming from anyone else, slow to adopt anything beyond an air of self-serving cockiness. He’s a refined version of the douche-bag behaviors Jackson Whittemore eventually matured out of, and doesn’t everyone have to know it?

But he falters in the most subtle of ways. Stiles noted it early on, when they were in a car with the windows up, doors locked, seatbelts predictably neglected. The flush of health which Theo usually exuded from the pores of his annoyingly flawless skin had slowly leeched out over the upholstery. He was trying so very quietly, and so very desperately to seem like he didn’t give a single fuck, but Stiles knew that look. He’d seen it daubed across the mirror in his bathroom on mornings where getting out of bed felt like it might take a small eternity, if it happened at all. It’d been reflected in Lydia’s eyes, crystal in clarity, painful in practice.

Theo Raeken is allergic to confined spaces. Theo Raeken is on the verge of a panic attack one out of every five times they see each other. Theo Raeken is too _fucking_ proud, perhaps too aware of how little anyone would care if he admitted that his armor wasn’t intact. That he’s been damaged by sights unseen, days, weeks, months of a hell he refused to acknowledge he’d visited.

Through a mouthful of chips, some god-awful spicy flavor which burns his sensitive white boy tongue, Stiles tries again. Theo’s still doing a pretty good impression of someone who’s suddenly developed the ability to tune his voice out entirely as he re-positions himself in a wholly uncomfortable looking hitch upon the wide ledge of the bedroom window. They’d have been downstairs, but the look his dad had given Stiles on the way out had been a warning of sorts. Best to keep the mess of Theo’s presence contained to his own cluttered corner of the house.

Not that his cheeks hadn’t lit up like the fourth of July on their trek up the stairs. Sure, he’d been bluntly assured by the sheriff way back when that he was most assuredly not gay, but they’d all thought Jackson was straighter than straight, and look how that’d turned out. Theo is just about dead last on a list of guys Stiles would allow his dad to (even mistakenly) believe he’s hooking up with (He’s tied with Peter ‘Leer Like You Mean It’ Hale, and fucking Derek), and yet he’d been treated like a very real prospect by the older man. As spectacularly unlikely as the reality seemed to the both of them. 

_Jesus on a tricycle._

Theo beats his miniature crisis of sexuality, and said highly important lists of not-crushes to the punch, eyes trained upon a point somewhere beyond the yard. As if he can only bring himself to talk about anything without a heaping of flippancy if there’s something like distance between them.

“Pitchforks, hellfire, the whole nine yards. They had me waiting in this line that felt like it took forever, led to absolutely nothing. Then came the spanki—”

A textbook, ‘Ancient Celtic Symbols: A Practical Assessment of the History of their significance in the Third and Fourth Centuries’, slams into the wall beside Theo’s head - spine cracking quite spectacularly before it disappears into a mound of unfolded bedding. The dusted smear of orange which clings to Stiles’ lips, just shy of one beauty spot in a hundred, and the crumple of hems and sleeves, and mismatched socks don’t do much to detract from a sudden assault upon Theo’s personal space that many others might have thought twice about.

“That’s the damn synopsis from an episode of Supernatural, you— _you_ –Stop walking around like everything’s _peachy keen, jelly bean_ , and you’re straight back to living the high and mighty big bad lifestyle, because you’re not. Liam told Scott, and Scott can’t lie for shit. Nightmares. Night terrors–whatever you want to call them, and you look like you’re gonna crawl right out of your skin whenever we’re inside the jeep. You’re not okay, and I am not okay with you not being okay–”

There it is again, that cornered look, a feral animal with a wounded paw who’d sooner bare its fangs than give in. Only Theo doesn’t pick Stiles up, throw him right out of the open window whose sill is pressed into the small of his back. Doesn’t make good on all the threats which have gone unspoken, and those which were all too painfully vocalized before he was torn right out of existence by a group for whom death had become all too mundane a prospect.

He mouths something else, using lips that Stiles has seen twisted with emotion - both genuine and questionable at best, stained with blood and soot, bitten raw, and molded into the falsest of smiles. Hot bursts of breath tickle at his own mouth, and the close nature of their proximity to each other, Theo’s hand a brace around the sharp tilt of his hip, his own pale fingers fisting up in a handful of a t-shirt he’s seen worn three times already this week. They’ve sunk into aligned orbits without meaning to. Stiles’ heart flutters in his chest, a precursor to the familiar skitter and hitch of a panic attack, but neither man moves an inch.

_Are you done._

Ironically, for two people who unashamedly adore the sounds of their own voices, it’s silence which shuts Stiles down quite completely. That, and the rough command Theo takes of his lips. He kisses like he means something, for the first time in his short, bloody, _tragic_ excuse for a life. As if he doesn’t have to try, not even slightly, to look past the fact that both of them have been corralled into the shape of killers. Notions of how terrible of an idea this is fall by the wayside. After all, no one would accuse Stiles of being anything less than impulsive, and for once there’s nothing calculated in the way Theo crowds him up against the nearest wall, still within reach of a tender breeze where it whispers through the open window.

Discarded wrappers, forgotten homework assignments, small pockets of empty space dissolve underneath their bare feet, and for a moment everything just slips away as if it never existed to begin with. The void into which he’d been bound up, a disturbingly eager witness to the crimes of his own body, its there prickling at those neglected locks in Stiles’ head. Stark in just how similar it might’ve been to Theo’s own fate, if only he’d gone quite as willingly as Stiles refuses to admit he had. Theo’s dangerous, a wild card, the only wagon he’d refused to hitch himself to whilst under the illusion that pack was all that mattered.

And yet they’re making out like it’s prom night; _desperate_ and _hungry_ to get lost in anything but the reality of being broken. Theo’s stubborn, taking up every inch of air between them, eager hands mapping out the contours of a body which could be so easily torn to shreds beneath him. He breaks away first though, catching himself before a smile laden with typical smugness can quite form upon those treacherous lips of his.

And holy shit, he’s actually sincere. If Stiles had a camera to hand he’d take a picture. Frame something so rare, and so baffling it somehow quells the stir of panic in his guts, study it’s complexities during those hours before dawn when sleep is so very elusive. Theo’s watching him now, silent for once, maybe a little skewed himself by the fact that swapping spit with a boy with an unpronounceable name who’d tried to kill him, might be an antidote to both of their ills.

Stiles sits up, puts the brakes on, huddles down into a hoodie which feels stifling now. Theo’s hand is fever pitch, curled with perplexing care around the nape of his neck. He leaves it there, doesn’t say another word. Lets the spell they’ve concocted quite by accident to distill itself.

When the front door clicks open three hours later little has changed, save for the height of the sun upon an expectant horizon. Theo opened up slowly, whispering details which had come with the promise of violence if Stiles dared utter them to another soul. Maybe it was rhetorical, but whether Theo cares or not he’s the bearer of Stiles’ own murmured truths. Things he’s never even considered saying out loud. Not to Scott, not to Lydia, not even Malia during the short, tempestuous, ill-fated time in which he’d believed he was in love with her too.  
An actual lock upon Stiles’ door had gone the same way as true privacy. It was for his own good, and for the peace of mind it provided his only remaining family, Stiles had agreed to his father’s unshakable conviction in the idea.

Worn out by the mere of act of letting their guards fall, curled around each other like they’d formed their own pact was how the sheriff found his son - the teenage wunderkind with the smart mouth, and a boy who’s belonged nowhere his entire life. And for all it’s perils he finds no concrete reasons with which he can justify separating them.


End file.
